PORTLAND – It’s not often a play in a professional theatrical setting gets an immediate standing ovation before the lights are fully dimmed at final curtain. It’s also virtually unheard of for any kind of work – creative or historical – dealing with slavery and the Civil War to receive a healthy dose of laughs […]

PORTLAND – When I was a young boy, I used to spend my summers in a remote Greek farming village, helping my great aunt Nike harvest acres of vegetable crops and groves of olive trees. At night, exhausted, I slept under the stars on a blanket-covered flat stand on her front porch. During my first […]

PORTLAND – I’m convinced that Portland Stage’s executive and artistic director Anita Stewart is a very funny lady. Not that Stewart isn’t dead serious, and professional about her job and about bringing high quality theatre to Portland Stage’s audiences. I’ve seen her intensity at work first hand. But every year when the company’s season is […]

PORTLAND – As a boy, my eyes always misted up at the end of Frank Capra’s 1946 silver screen Christmas classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” So when I recently took in Portland Stage’s 2017 rendition of Joe Landry’s well-regarded 1996 stage version – which I never before had seen – the jaded journalist in me almost […]

PORTLAND – Jazz standards are like that. Prior to the opening of Portland Stage’s opening show of the 2017 season, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” by Lanie Robertson, artistic and executive director Anita Stewart came to the top of the stairs house left, all the way back against the wall in Row M, […]

PORTLAND — When I was in college in upstate NY, the period immediately following Christmas break was affectionately known on campus as “the gray season.” January and February were cold and depressing. Fast forward to today. In northern New England, not much has changed during a time of year that still sees a peak of […]

It may have taken legendary American playwright A.R. Gurney (a.k.a. “Pete”) into his fifties to overcome critical and audience bias against his so-called “WASP culture” characters and storylines, but it won’t take any audience member of “Later Life”—one of Gurney’s masterpieces now playing at Portland Stage Company— more than a few minutes to appreciate the inherent […]

In my summer travels and writings, I recently had an opportunity to see the play “The City of Conversation,” by Anthony Giardina. The play is about family and politics, and how the latter could affect the former. In short, and without diving into the work itself too much, the play is about two strong women, […]

Sitting in the shadows during a weekend performance of Portland Stage’s “Lost Boy in Whole Foods,” the poet E.E. Cummings haunted me: a man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat fate per a somewhat more than less emancipated evening had […]

You knew right away — from the opening lines, in fact — that this version of Sherlock Holmes was going to produce a delightfully delicious evening. When the usual Portland Stage Company official did not come out to welcome the crowd and thank sponsors — leaving the task instead to the play’s three actors (who were already on stage) — […]

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Telly Halkias

Award-winning freelance journalist from Portland's West End. Writes columns, features, and drama reviews for newspapers in Vermont, where he also owns a home, Massachusetts, New York and Maine.. Former weekend columnist at the now defunct Portland Sun. Longtime adjunct professor of college English/history/humanities. Has lived overseas for 15 years, and all over the U.S. Veteran. Small business owner. Published poet. ATCA drama critic. Loves all things outdoors, and Siberian huskies.